Acquired directly from the Artist by T. L. Johnson✤ in thelate 1950s

Original canvas. There is a small area of old paint separation below the centre of the upper edge; the surface is very slightly dirty otherwise the work appears in good original condition with some strong passages of impasto. Under ultraviolet light there appear to be a few minor spots of retouching to a few places along each edge. There are also two larger areas which fluoresce butin the yellow pigment along the left edge but these appear to be the artist's hand. Held in a cream coloured wooden box frame. Please telephone the department on 0207 293 6424 if you have any further questions about the present work.
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Trained at Camberwell School of Art, Frost's earliest mature work tracks a path to abstraction which is quite distinct in its style and influences. Although he was working in St Ives in the early 1950s, Frost's painting did not fully embrace the gestural abstraction of Cornish contemporaries such as Lanyon, tending to keep a strong element of carefully balanced and calculated spatial elements at the fore. Thus his St Ives paintings from the early 1950s sit at the very centre of the debate between the experience-influenced abstracted images of the St Ives painters a𒀰nd the rigorously constructivist work of the artists of the Fitzroy group and therefore have a cru꧂cial place in British abstract art of the immediate post-war period.

The group of works to which Yellow Day belongs mostly date from 1951-53 although the genesis is generally considered to be the important 1950 painting Walk Along the Quay (Private Collection). In this work and others of the group, Frost sought to find a visual language which would express the sense of place and movement found in the harbour of St Ives in an abstract idiom. Derived in part from his experience of early morning walks through the town, the paintings use extremely sophisticated geometrical relationships to suggest familiar forms and shapes whilst never actually offering us pictorially identifiable references. These paintings also see the earliest appearances of what was to become the standard vocabulary of Frost's art: the semi-circles, the highlighted discs and the truncated 'L' and 'T' forms.

The paintings of this group are also distinctive in their use of colour, each tending to have one overall dominant palette which is varied throughout the painting. In Yellow Day the masterly use of the 🐼two small segments of black is almost an object lesson in how the smallest area of paint can influence the entire composition, working to enhance the brightness of the yellows of the rest of the painting and providing a solid contrast to the forms which💦 climb across to the right hand edge.

Yellow Day is a painting which combines theoretical concerns, such as the use of geometric partition of the picture plane and the clear influence of the writing of D'Arcy Thompson, with the more romantic suggestion of boats at anchor, the encroaching tide and the 𝄹forms and movement of the harbour-side to create an image of great power and impact which almost six🦩ty years after its execution still looks fresh and exciting.